My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears, which he thought stood out funny, and the vitiligo that looked like spilled bleach across his arms and shins. He was a handsome man, with a beaming smile, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t want to be noticed. He wore a lot of beige.
My father’s EPA office was in the flashy downtown skyscraper where J. R. Ewing swindled his fortunes on the TV show Dallas. But the two men couldn’t have been further apart. My father was a diligent government worker who scanned our bills at Steak and Ale to flag any item accidentally left off the tab. He took me to a movie every Saturday, and he let me choose the film (a luxury no second child forgets), but he was so anxious about arriving on time we often showed up before the previous movie had ended. We’d linger in the lobby for 20 minutes, the two of us sitting on carpeted stair steps, not talking.
As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there. He had an introversion common to Finns, and to engineers. He avoided eye contact. If he was growing up today, I’m curious what a psychiatrist would make of him. He had a boyhood habit of stimming, rocking back and forth to soothe himself. In his 20s, he had a compulsive blinking tic. In his middle age, he kept a notebook listing every winning Dallas lotto number, recorded in his careful, geometrically precise block lettering. A futile attempt at charting randomness.
Perhaps these were coping mechanisms of a childhood harsher than mine. His father was sent to a mental institution when my dad was 15—a breakdown brought on by mental illness, drinking, or both. But most of my dad’s past, like my dad himself, was a mystery to me. All I knew was that my father was not like those loud, wisecracking fathers on sitcoms who tousled your hair and tickled you till you snorted. He communicated in his own rhythms. If I said, “I love you, Daddy,” he would sometimes pat my head and say, “OK. Thanks.” So I learned that fathers were very loyal and dependable people who existed behind glass.
My mother was full of passion and conversation. I sometimes marveled these two people ever came together, but I was charmed by tales of their courtship. In lieu of an engagement ring, my father gave her money to study in Germany, an act of gentle nonconformity and global discovery that shaped my worldview. But at night, in our cramped house, their fights curled like smoke underneath their bedroom door. And as tender as my mother could be, an Irish fire lurked in her, too. I could hear her voice each night, bitten by frustration. The tone that always made the veins on the side of her neck stand up like cords. Why can’t you do this right, John? Why can’t you listen, John?
For a while, my brother and I were allies on this battleground. Josh was my hero, a swashbuckling little boy who could find excitement in any dusty corner. He turned blankets into royal capes and wicker chairs into spaceships from a galaxy far, far away. He was four and a half years older than me, with a precocious mind forever solving the Rubik’s Cube of how the world worked. Of course, he solved his actual Rubik’s Cube. I gave up, and changed the stickers.
I didn’t realize it, but Josh had a rough entry to school, too. A Yankee boy dropped into a part of the world where kids were still fighting the Civil War. The brainiac skills that wowed his younger sister were useless on the football field, where Texas boys proved their mettle. And by the time he entered middle school, our shared excursions had turned into his solo journeys: onto the clunky personal computer he won in a radio contest, into the J. R. R. Tolkien books crinkled and dog-eared with devotion. I wanted to follow him into those exotic boylands, but he started closing doors in my face. Get out. Go away.
I got my own room. Pink walls, red carpet, a Strawberry Shortcake explosion. And in this private universe, where no one could criticize me, I was the star of every show. My fantasy worlds were dominated by girls like me, discovering their own power. I was Sandy, in the last scene of Grease, strutting in hot pants and causing a bulge in every man’s heart. I was plucky Orphan Annie, rescued by a billionaire she saved right back. I was Coco, fan-kicking her way through the cafeteria in Fame.
Fame. I wanted it more than anything. If you were famous, nothing hurt. If you were famous, everyone loved you. In fifth grade, I would start plastering my walls with teen pinups—Prince Charming in the form of a soft boy with a popped collar—and I became fixated on celebrity and glamour, those twin instruments of escape.
But before that, there was the beer.
OUR PEARL LIGHT lived in 12-packs resting on the floor to the right of our cream-colored Kenmore fridge. Reaching inside that cardboard box gave me a bad thrill, like sinking my hands into a vat of warm wax. All that carbonated joy rumbling around my fingertips.